Saturday, April 9, 2016

The beginning of April is
always a time for practical jokes and Blizzard's ultra-efficient
marketing-machine never misses the opportunity to shine the limelight on its
products in this less-than-orthodox manner, by putting out prank announcements
concerning new games, special items and hair-raising patch tweaks. This year,
they were on top of their game again. Most of their April Fools effort went
into HearthStone, the MMO, a game the company is supposedly working on, which
will transfer the card-based antics into a three-dimensional MMO world...never
mind the fact that most of its characters/game-world was inspired by World of
Warcraft to begin with. To push this prank, Blizzard put out a short video,
which - due to its overly goofy nature - screams "prank" from afar,
thereby sort of defeating its very purpose by telephoning its nature...

The company targeted some of
its other titles for April Fools jokes too: for WOW, new patch-notes have been
released for the upcoming Legion expansion, in which the MMO was deemed
"too massive". As a solution to that problem, the patch would reduce
the size of the buildings and the foliage by some 25%. Players would be enabled
to use emojis and some "HearthStone content" would find its way into
the game too, content which had initially been transferred into HearthStone
from WOW.

A bit more effort went into the
Starcraft "prank" which took the shape of an actual, playable retro
mini-game, which has players controlling Nova on a Vulture, as she races/avoids
other vehicles and airstrikes.

As far as Diablo III goes, a
number of purchasable items were announced. Among them the Hammer Pajammer and
a cookbook from Tyrael stood out. Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm have thus
far been spared of the April Fools-inspired ridicule.